28 MEDICINE 



gation which gave medicine in Europe its ascendency. Young men 

 at an age when authority has the least weight, and before there 

 was opportunity given them for the investigation of the clinical phe- 

 nomena of disease, found in the laboratory opportunity for inves- 

 tigation, and had small questions placed before them which could 

 be solved. The laboratory gave the workers scientific methods which 

 formed the basis, and gave the direction of further work in the 

 clinic. With the laboratory came also a division of labor, which 

 allowed certain men to devote their time to investigation and 

 teaching. Ambition was stimulated, for advance and the further 

 career was made dependent upon the ability for investigation. 



It is interesting to follow a wave of speculation in medicine which 

 reached its acme in Germany in the early part of the nineteenth 

 century. In the period following the Reformation the most striking 

 figure in medicine was Albrecht v. Haller, a man who as investigator 

 and clear thinker has been equaled by few. Haller recognized the 

 important fact that life was a property inherent in the tissues and 

 manifested itself by sensation and movement. On the work of Haller 

 is founded the system of Brown, who though a Scotchman can be 

 regarded as the forerunner of the German Natur-philosophie in 

 medicine. The system of Brown is founded on the principle, which 

 he states clearly, that the living animal body is distinguished from 

 the dead and from all lifeless matter by the capacity for excitation by 

 external influences. The difference between health and disease lies 

 in the degree of irritability of the tissues. He divided disease into 

 the sthenic and asthenic types, according to the degree of irritability 

 developed by the excitant, and the treatment of disease was based 

 on this. In the hands of Brown's pupils and successors treatment 

 of disease was productive of great harm. The theory of Brown 

 found ready acceptance in Germany, not only by physicians but by 

 a group of men who sought to explain nature by the creation of laws. 

 The law once made was regarded as more correct than the observa- 

 tion. Schelling, who was the foremost figure in this philosophy, 

 sought to give a representation of all the phenomena in nature, to 

 develop the interrelation of the phenomena, to show the action of 

 natural laws in all bodies, and believed that these laws originated in 

 a common point and were characterized as an advancing series of 

 higher phases of development of matter. Not only was it impossible 

 to construct a system of the world from the knowledge of nature 

 at that time, and it probably never will be possible, but Schelling 

 very imperfectly utilized what knowledge there was. This Natur- 

 philosophie dominated medicine in Germany during the first quarter 

 of the nineteenth century. It is expressed to a greater or less extent 

 in all medical writing. The most gifted men could not entirely 

 withdraw from its influence. Medicine was not a science following 



